


Volcanic Activity

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: jaeger x townie otp [3]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Adoption, Bondage, Drabble Collection, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff, Gen, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Sexual Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-02-23 06:36:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 19,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2537873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Which Sorin Petrescu, Traveling Blacksmith, and His Boyfriend, CPL Velimir "Veli" Ardel of the 3rd Jaegermonster Regiment, Do Stuff and Occasionally Each Other.</p><p>Collection of sidefics, and other pebbles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "A convo between Anton and Veli about that one time he liberated one of Gil's lab experiments... (Unless no one found out because Veli was being a sneaky bastard)"
> 
> This takes place during the last chapter of Pyroclastic.

"If hyu tells me hyu iz planning to use dis in battle tomorrow Hy vill laugh until Hy fall und die." 

Veli paused in the middle of the previously-empty corridor, and turned -- wobbled under the huge boulder-engine he was lugging around, and managed to steady it just in time to grin guilelessly at Anton.

The red-furred Jäger ambled up to him, poked the rock-engine, and arched a bushy eyebrow, probably at the temperature. "... Oh no, keed. Tell me dis ting iz not vhat Hy tink it iz."

"It's not vhat hyu think it is," Velimir said, very nicely. Anton punched him in the shoulder. Velimir almost dropped it onto his foot, and had to do some serious, back-straining acrobatics to stabilize it again. "Hoy!"

"If it fall und break und burn hyu again, Hy iz going to stand back und laugh."

"Iz mine evil plan." Velimir rolled his eyes, good-naturedly, and started walking again. Anton was going to heckle until the cows came home, but he wouldn't tattle. "Hy make hyu laugh so wide, hyu crack hyu mouth open und can never speak again. Muahaha."

Anton snorted. "Truly hyu iz a madboy of old." Hands tucked behind his back, he walked at Velimir's side, watching in distant interest as Velimir struggled to deal with the weight and the awkward balance. "So vhat do hyu need it for, really?"

"Secret!" Velimir deepened his accent until he sounded pretty much like Anton himself. "Ein sekret so dark Hy ken neffer tell."

"Ho. Courting gift."

... Well. "Maybe."

"Pfffft." Anton rolled his eyes, clacked his tongue. "'che. Do hyu tink de boy vill like it? He gots bad hurt vith de lava before. Gotta be scary."

"Jah, jah, de great big scary thing." Velimir was the one who rolled his eyes next. "Hy think he vill stare at it all mean und go _hah!_."

And it would be adorable as all hells, he bet. D'aw, his little lava cannon.

"Urgh."

"Jealous."

"Like hell Hy iz _jeluz_." A sigh, and then he actually sobered up. "Jah, he iz cute, for a townie. He iz still--"

"Anton," Velimir said, calm and steely. "Iz not any of hyu business where Hy put mine prick, und even less hyu business where Hy put mine _affections_. Vhen mine sveetie has died on me again and again Hy vill have all de time in de world to be blase about courting. Hy iz not in any hurry to schteal hyu grumpy crown."

Silence, for a couple of steps, and then Anton punched him in the shoulder again, but almost ruefully.

Then they passed a bunch of the Baron's people and Velimir hurried to wobble the boulder-engine and maybe bounce it a little. "Whoa whoa whoa gonna fall, gonna fall--"

"Hokay, hyu scare dem all off," Anton said, craning his neck to check. "But dey iz fit to remember it now."

Urgh. Then again with something so big there wasn't much of a choice. The only way to camouflage it even a little bit was to make it part of something even more extravagant. And... yeah, it wasn't going to work for long. "Bah," he muttered. "Iz not like Hy _stole_ it."

"Asking de fourteen-year-old boy so deep in de madness place he sees birdies riding hell cats on tricycles und thinks _oh yez, Hy must best that_ , doz not count as _asking_."

"... Hokay, so hy stole it. Whoops. Vant to help me get it down off de ship?"

"Ho, shore ting! Hy be careful to push hyu overboard _just right_ so hyu soften its landing with hyu skull. Vill vork _great_ for it."

They kept bickering all the way down to the docking bay, so casual that when Velimir requisitioned a crate to put his engine into and mail it down no one even thought to question it.

Anton rolled his eyes until he must have strained them, but he looked the other way when Velimir wrote his sweetie a quick note to slip in it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "One of Veli's jaeger brother's sees why exactly he's so smitten on Sorin? *hopeful*"
> 
> "Prompt! Awkward things about having a Jager for a lover that Sorin has gotten used to. Also, possibly related, the first time Sorin dealt with Veli's brothers with surprising aplomb."
> 
> This is, i think, happening the first or second time they manage to meet up post-Pyroclastic.

Velimir likes it, in Sorin's little traveling forge. It smells strong, heated metal and chemicals and leather, but it's warm too, warm enough that it's almost better to sleep naked. The walls are solid, the defenses laid around the outside make it safe. There's this little reddish glow... 

Also he can sprawl all over Sorin, or have Sorin sprawl all over him, which is always a bonus. They'd put a mattress directly on the floor, since his bed is so narrow.

Then they'd proceeded to have sex for like two hours, which was pretty awesome and also pretty tiring, so he's not sure why he's awake right now.

" _Veliiiiiiii, ambush eet!_ "

... Right. That would be it.

He slides out from under Sorin's arm -- a bit sweaty, skin on skin -- and shuffles on hands and knees toward the side door, cracks it open. A gust of cold forest air slides down his body.

So does the distinctive thumping racket of two sets of footsteps racing through the grass with little care for stealth.

" _Hoy, Veli! Halp!_ "

Oh bloody thunder, it's Dario and Milosh.

He whirls around on his ass, snatches up his pants, slides them on -- wait not his pants but they still fit -- and jumps out of the door in the next second.

The two idiots are galloping downslope right at the traps Sorin put up around his camp. Yelling like that they'll wake people up in the nearby civilian caravan soonish. Sorin only put his own berth down so far from the rest of the travelers because he didn't want them hearing all the sex noises, but not even Velimir's best tricks have ever made Sorin yell half as loud as two idiot jaegers running from a -- _is that a cockatrice_.

Oh no, wait, he's wrong! Phew.

It's two cockatrices.

Which is why Dario and Milosh didn't separate so that one of them could play bait and the other one could do the ambushing. Okay, the world makes sense again.

He closes the door behind him and signals them to go around, even as he bounds ahead to hide in the bushes -- which _should_ work, damn it, but Sorin's pants are thick, rough leather for protection and won't bend. He can't jump far enough to get there in time; one of the cockatrices sees him, peels off to go after him. Damn it.

Okay, what if he leads it around the camp clockwise, and they lead the other one counterclockwise for a nice little double-KO...

Yeah, it would work alright if as he races around the camp he didn't see Milosh swinging by a foot from a stupid rope trap, and the stupid giant rooster bearing down on him.

"Close hyu eyes!" Velimir yells at Dario as Dario turns around instinctively. Oh, this is going to be messy, they are _so_ sandwiched. He plants a hand on Dario's head between the horns, flattening his hat, and somersaults over him. He scrunches his eyes closed as he flies, hooves first, toward where he thinks he saw that evil chicken of doom; he glances off something, feels feathers under him, grabs a hold.

Okay, awesome, he is now riding the cockatrice. The upside is that it's too busy dancing like crazy in an attempt to throw him off to go after Milosh. The downside is that it's going to think to peck him real soon, and it has a really mean-looking beak. He tries to crawl his way up to its neck, a handful of slippery feathers after another. The thing is bigger than two draft horses, but the neck seems breakable enough, so long as he _doesn't look it in the eye_ \--

"No! Go back inside!" Dario yells to -- someone to the side _gotterdammerung Sorin came out **he needs to kill this thing right now**_ \--

Light blooms so bright he sees it even with his eyes closed, the brim of his hat pushed down, and his face pressed to the thing's feathery back.

"Veli, get off!" Sorin snaps, so Velimir does. He rolls down and the second his hooves touch down he's bouncing to the side, far as he can, bouncing again without looking back. He knows what's coming.

The cockatrice screams really loud, but at least not for very long.

He peers out from behind a tree, checks his surroundings. Milosh is on the ground, the end of the rope still around his ankle, and Dario is standing beside him. They're blinking at the little traveling forge with dumb looks on their faces in the middle of clouds of stinky burnt-feather smoke.

Sorin, standing on the roof, pushes the lava cannon's turret back into its slot with a loud click, and scowls down at them. He looks grouchy, half-awake only.

"Everyone in one piece?"

"...Yessir," Milosh says, and gets up. He tests his ankle; it seems to hold up okay, so Veli trots up to him and gives him a friendly punch in the back of the head.

Also one for Dario, while he's at it. "Vhat de hell iz hyu two _doing_ here in de middle of de night," he demands as he herds them through the traps. They hunch their shoulders and exchange guilty looks.

Sorin snorts. Velimir looks up. He's still on the roof, through he's crouching now and only his head and a shoulder show. "I'm thinking _stupid prank_. What was it going to be? Cold water? Making pig sex noises? Surprise, it's the delivery man?"

"Oh hey, ve did not tink of de pig vun," Dario says, looking up, and blinks guilelessly. Milosh snickers and elbows Dario in the ribs, for all of two seconds before they wilt again.

Velimir watches Sorin stare them down. It's amusing because they've only ever met him when he was feeling awkward and intimidated, trying to make a good impression on the whole pack of them as they blustered at him en masse. Right now he's half-asleep and butt-naked in the middle of the night and the look he levels back at them is so completely _done_ it reminds him of old Sarge Drazhan a bit. It's a look that usually means someone is going to end up spending the night strung up by the ankles.

"Um."

"Sorry?"

"Yeah. Vhat he sez. Verra sorry."

Sorin just watches them in silence for another handful of seconds, crouching down to see them better.

"I don't think you're sorry yet..." Dario goes 'Mneep.' Sorin continues, calm, musing. "But we can certainly arrange that."

Velimir tries not to grin too widely. Milosh sneaks him a look, eyes a little big. "Hyu sveetie is _scary_."

"Pff. Dat is noting. Vait until he drive de truck at hyu und chase hyu all de vay back to camp."

"Tssk, don't spoil the surprise, dear," Sorin says in a vaguely chiding tone. Velimir has to bite his cheek to keep from laughing.

A sigh, and he gets up and _whoa_ that is a bit too much bare hip for those clowns. Velimir clears his throat and pushes the idiots' heads down as Sorin walks to the other side of the transport and slides down. He reappears a minute later, barefoot in the grass, in Velimir's pants and a badly laced undershirt. Ngh.

"Ve iz really verra sorry," Dario says, shuffling his feet like a guilty little boy, for all that he's over three hundred years old and the eldest of them all.

Sorin looks at him and at Milosh, doing their best to seem small and harmless (Milosh is built like a giant's brick shithouse and stands almost a head taller than Velimir when Velimir extends his legs all the way, so that's a bit hard) and sighs heavily. "I suppose that if we send the two of you back now you'll only land horns-first into another nest of the things."

Grins all around. "Yez!"

Milosh elbows Dario, bats his eyelashes, tries to tone down his grin. "Yez, ve mean, cannot go back, so sorry to impose--"

"Oh, I didn't say you were going to impose," Sorin replies, and throws such a dark look at him that it's impossible to pretend he meant it in a polite, it'll be fine way. "You're already inside the security perimeter, aren't you?"

"But iz cold und scary outside," Dario says, and looks miserable and begging as possible. Considering how huge his eyes are, that's saying something.

"Nah." Sorin smiles, mouth closed. They flinch. "With the forge banked, if I string you up against the outside of the walls you will be plenty warm. _And_ you can serve as an early warning system for any more of those giant chickens, huh? Okay, I think I like this plan."

Velimir can't hold it in any longer. "Pfff. Brodders, hyu iz going to die so bad."

They turn to look at him with betrayed faces. Milosh looks especially scandalized. "Vhat! Hyu own brodders, und hyu say it like dat! Blackheart! Traitor! Are ve not hyu own kin?!"

Velimir nods wisely, lips pinched tight to keep from laughing again. "Ah, but hyu don't put out."

"... Do you want to keep them company outside, or?"

Pff. Velimir grins, slips between them to go to his lover, and kisses the bridge of his nose, still smiling. "Hy also put out."

Sorin sighs in that way he does when he doesn't want to laugh. "Yeah, you'd _better_. Alright, everyone in. Ah, we're going to _smother_ ," he adds, muttering, as he turns to lead the way.

Velimir follows (his lover's butt looks very nice in Velimir's pants), a fatuous grin on his face.

Up until the butt stops in its tracks.

"Oh, dang it, I _am_ half-asleep. Someone draw water from the stream and go make sure the fire is all the way out? I mean, the grass is pretty green, but..."

Aw, he's gone all tired-deflated, he turns to look at Velimir and he looks a bit unsure, and he's totally about to offer he be the one to go. Velimir hugs him with one arm, kisses his forehead. "Hyu go back to bed, sveethart. Hy vatch over those two, make sure dey do it right. Ve join hyu in a minute." He turns around, narrows his eyes almost entirely playfully. "Soldiers, _march_."

He gets the buckets from under the carriage and hands those to them, makes a shooing motion. Grumbling, they go. He follows, chafing at his arms a little. It's not _that_ cold outside, not for him, but after the toasty-warmth inside and the excitement of a fight he feels the drop in temperature.

"Hy haff to admit Hy get it a _leedle_ better now," Dario says, head tilted in thought.

Velimir blinks. "Hmm?"

"Huh, yez," Milosh says from up there. "All vith de rawr und de bossy, und preddy quick vith a cannon, huh. Did not expect dat, he voz all _shy_ before."

Dario snickers. "Hy mean he doz not look half-bad nekkid." Velimir stops to stare. Dario waggles his eyebrows. "Dat's some... _gun show_."

There is not even an ounce of pretending he means Sorin's arms on that face.

"... Hokay. Hyu get to sleep under our feet."

"Oh no, hyu _kick!_ "

"Deal vith it."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "How far does that glow go?!"
> 
> Doesn't contain orgasms or intercourse, but pretty frank about the sexual context.
> 
> No fixed place in the timeline, but this feels like they've been together for at least a year or two by now.

The bed in Sorin's wagon is pretty narrow. It folds up against the side wall; two corners hang on chains. Veli fits, face down, head resting on his crossed arms, but only when his legs bend at the knee to rest up against the side of the forge.

Sorin is sitting on exactly one buttock, a foot on the floor, hands slicked with massage oil rubbing and kneading their way up his lover's inner thighs, and smiling when Veli sighs and his split hooves tighten like one with normal feet would curl their toes.

Velimir is entirely, gloriously naked on his bed, loose and satisfied like a cat. Feeling at home like one. Sorin doesn't think it will ever get old.

They had the passionate I-missed-you fuck against a wall yesterday evening. Today is it's-nice-to-touch-you, slow and thorough, and Sorin's dick is only about half ready for any action, leaning like a drunk man who still thinks he can walk home against his thigh. He's still enjoying himself quite a lot, just from making Veli feel good.

... Still.

He tries not to say it for about ten minutes, hands gliding over taut skin, fingers digging into hard muscles. He tries very hard, and he fails.

"You know..."

Velimir makes a little purring hum as acknowledgment, cracks an eye open to look at him.

Sorin considers the buttocks his hands are framing, one nicked with a pale scar but otherwise looking quite soft and inviting in his callused hold.

... Yeah, no, he has to say it.

"I guess it's nice to know for sure that if the lights all went out at once I'd still be able to tell where to aim."

Veli laughs so hard he almost clocks Sorin in the head with a hoof.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorin Meets Agatha, as asked by too many people to keep track of. XD
> 
> This is happening shortly after a divergence from the train arc in canon. Sorin is around 28 years old.

When Dimo starts to swear under his breath is when Agatha gets just a tad worried. She checks her death ray -- ready to go, but she only has two hands and she needs them both on it. She seriously needs some kind of multi-targeting ability, or failing that another three or four clanks to do the cover fire and back-watching for her, but then she'd have to run maintenance and --

"What is it?" she asks as she hunkers down in the shadow of the wall. There's snow on the ground, dirty, slushy, packed in the corners. The wet spreads through the knees of her pants.

Dimo's upper lip is curled a bit at the corner in disgusted exhaustion. (She's not sure he's entirely healed from the beating he took at the hands of those bear things, but he won't tell, and they can't afford to stop long enough for him to heal so she can't even ask.) "Sparkhounds."

"In _town_?"

"Ayup. Right by de West gate."

Wow. Martellus isn't even pretending anymore to be polite to the people he's not yet reigning over, is he. Wow.

"The West gate is where the caravanserai is situated, isn't it," she says with a sigh, because of course that is where they planned to hitch a ride out of town to where Zeetha and Krosp and Violetta are supposed to catch up, and of course it'd be where Martellus is starting his sweep.

"Ov cauze." Dimo sighs, short and sharp. "De vay Hy see it, ve still haff no better choice for getting out ov here."

She agrees, so she nods, grim, and follows him at a fast clip through the backstreets, gun ready.

The baying of the sparkhounds stays in one place as they move. "What's over there? I think he's still negotiating, or he'd have started a sweep through town already--"

"Won't negotiate for long. Dat type neffer does."

She sighs. They're in the shadow of the caravanserai now, a huge, enclosed inn where travelers rest before leaving again. "You don't need to tell _me_." He's probably figuring out a way to crush through the town's defense, and she hopes he won't kill the men who dared to lower them against him in punishment; she could see him commending them on a job well done, too, but then killing them anyway. Martellus von Blitzengaard is a complete _brute_ that way. She'd have preferred dealing with the Baron. The Baron is smarter, more dangerous to her, but at least he tries his best to keep the collateral damage to a minimum...!

Dimo boosts her up to a window that she jimmies open, and then they're hiding in some kind of water closet, where the sparkhounds will find them in a hot second because it isn't as if they've been breaking their scent trail any.

"I need to get a better look at the berths available," she mutters. Maybe there will be one that can break through the blockade, or that she can fix into breaking through...

"Coming right up, Mistress," Dimo says, and they burst out into a bedroom and startle a maid. Agatha is very sorry that they have to bundle her up in her sheets and lock her up in a closet, but she leaves her a gold piece for the inconvenience and hopes the sparkhounds won't be tempted to bite, smelling Agatha on her.

She appropriates the cleaning chemicals on the way out. She ought to be able to produce a stink bomb or two from these...

They're trotting their way brisk but casual-looking around the inner gallery that surrounds the courtyard, and she's visually shopping for pieces amongst the machines and trailers parked underneath, when Dimo brakes so hard she runs into his back nose-first.

She scans their surroundings, nose smarting and refusing to take her hands off her gun to rub at it; she sees nothing, no suspicious servant, no sudden running. "What is it?"

"...Dat schmell..."

He turns, frowning, takes a step toward the guardrail, where he'll be in the light and more visible from every single room that opens onto the courtyard. His nose is in the air, nostrils flaring.

"Not _shore_ , but..."

Baying. Moving closer. Their window of opportunity is rapidly shrinking. "Go," she snaps, and he's grabbing her by the waist and rolling the both of them over the guardrail in the next second. Then they're amidst horses and tractors and a mess of people going back and forth with their packages and their piles of boxes.

They're noticed, of course they are, her weapon is hardly discreet and Dimo's skin noticeably green whenever the light falls on him, but he's on the scent like a hound and she follows, grim-eyed.

Then he stops in his tracks, turns, changes directions, stops again.

"Hy schmell _jaeger_ , but --"

They're hidden behind a pile of boxes but her neck still itches. Anyone could be in the shadowed gallery overhead, snipe them down or just track them, she'd never know. "But?"

Dimo growls his frustration, stalks ahead around the wagons. "Iz so _weak_ Hy--"

He impacts the man coming the other way chest-first; the man stumbles back, grabs desperately for the wagon, knocked half off his feet. "Hey! What the --"

Dimo has him by the collar in the next second, and Agatha yelps in shock. " _Dimo!_ What are you _doing?_ "

She can _see_ what he's doing! He's got his nose in the man's neck and he's _sniffing_.

The man is blinking back at him, looking rather baffled.

Not panicking, though, apart from the first moment of instinctive fear.

"Oh, I don't think I've met you," he says, sounding almost casual for a man with a jaeger at his throat. "Did you want something, or...?"

"Awgh, scheiss," Dimo groans. "Hy vos hoping for a _brodder_. Hyu iz alone here?"

"Um. Yes?" The man blinks at Dimo, then at Agatha over Dimo's shoulder, both eyebrows going up in confused surprise at her presence. There's a big patch of shiny-old burn scar on his cheek but the sheep-like curls framing his face and bursting out from the hat make him come across as younger than he probably is; she thinks twenty-five, twenty-eight? More innocent, too, and Agatha does not understand a damn thing about this person or why Dimo would think he smells like _jaeger_ and--

A young girl comes pelting through the building's front gate, yelling fit to make her throat raw. "Army at the gates! Army!"

Suddenly it's chaos in the courtyard, people rushing to pack up their wares, get their weapons. Well, the chaos might help more if they weren't all _penned in_ \--

"Get in," the man snaps, and throws the back of his truck open. Dimo boosts her up and shoves in after her, and then before she can yell 'no!' the door clangs closed and it's _dark_ , they have locked themselves up in a _box_ for ease of picking up and --

Banked fire glow. The powerful smell of melted iron.

Her hand finds a wall and finds tools on that wall and it's a _forge_.

"Light!" she orders; she needs to see what she's working with, oh goody, a traveling _forge_ , with tools and base materials and _things_!

She doesn't even _need_ a light, if she charges up her death ray it will provide light enough, she just has to not hit the trigger and all will be well, there's only a seventeen percent chance of catastrophic overload, they will be fine.

Lovely, lovely tools.

She grumbles a little when her new laboratory starts moving around, but Dimo is here to grab her before she faceplants and nothing else matters.

A few minutes later she emerges from her fugue long enough to yell, "Did you know this was a _lava engine?_ "

She can have another three cannons installed on the sides in another fifteen minutes. It will be glorious. And if she adds some electromagnetic guiding and -- hmm, what could she use for coolant -- they could even make their own road, why, yes, it's got to be the same principle as what she figured out with Brother Matthias just the other day...!

... From the roar of the motor they are not going half as fast as they could.

"Step on it!" she yells. "I can work on it either way!"

"Are you damn well _kidding?!_ You don't want us to be the first at the East gate, how do you plan to outrun them if we--"

"Oh! Camouflage! I can do that!"

" _Don't do anything!_ "

Vexed, she finishes installing the coolant system. She'll show him!

And then Dimo is picking her up and when she snarls and tries to knock the back of her head into his face he just throws her upwards -- shoves her?

Oh, hey, they're in the aeration system. It's so intensely hot in here she starts sweating in fat drops in about three seconds; the leather of her boot sizzles where it touches a metal tube. She calculates her rate of dehydration and decides that she will keep her eyes and mouth closed; it should give her another five minutes of survival.

There's no air to be had, even less air when Dimo wedges himself in after her.

Eyes closed, head tucked in, arms and upper body curled around a pocket of stale but vaguely less scorching air, she listens to the hisses and clicks of the engine as it comes to a stop, the clanging back doors, the footsteps on the floor under them.

She hopes Dimo managed to shove the incriminating evidence from her fugue somewhere before he came up into the fake ceiling with her. She can hear voices, but they're muffled.

The man with the curls sounds pretty calm, for the situation, which means not entirely calm but she figures it should be excusable from someone escaping before an invading army... And who even is he? Dimo is trusting him with _her_ , and obviously there wasn't much choice but... Mechanicsburger? He doesn't have even a trace of the accent. Someone's spy? Messenger boy?

Something huge with claws snuffs its way around the forge, and she waits to hear it howl.

It whines instead. " _Stinks!_ "

"... course... _forge_ , what do you ...pect..."

A few heavy clangs -- people hitting the walls, seeing what they sound like. She winces when they hit right underneath her knee and the metal shudders unpleasantly.

"--break the cooling system ... all dying right here and now, dumbass! What next, opening the engine core? -- that wasn't an invitation!"

Mutterings, growing weaker. Outside people are yelling; they want to get out and there's a queue.

The back door of the truck clangs closed. The engine starts again -- heat curls the hair in her nose, makes it start to smell burnt.

It's another five minutes and she's very close to passing out when cold air rushes in their little space and Dimo's solid weight against her calf disappears. She wriggles back, hissing as her hands push against heated metal, lets him catch her by the hips and lower her back to the floor.

She sits on the floor, her back pressed to the anvil, and as the truck negotiates the first mountain pass she drinks down half the flask of water Dimo hands her and pants a lot.

"Whew. Dat vos cloze."

"Mmh." She eyes her experiments. She still wants to finish up. Martellus could realize that she's not in town anymore any minute now; they need the defenses.

"I've got overhangs to keep light out of my windows, that should make the cabin pretty dark from the outside," the man calls from his place in the driver's seat. "One of you want to sit in front?"

She exchanges a look with Dimo, and then she drags herself up. More than defense they need to figure out their escape route. She unlocks the grate between the back and the cabin and wriggles her way over the back of the seat. Dimo follows, props his arms on the back of the seat between Agatha and the driver.

The driver flicks her a curious look.

And then a second look.

And then he chokes on his tongue. What, he hadn't realized? Huh, that's--

"Wow, you look different when you're not naked," is the first thing he says.

Agatha turns tomato-colored. It doesn't help much that the man does, too. Dimo is snorting in the pseudo-backseat.

"Oh dear little mimmoths, I'm sorry, why did I say that, I don't even know. Lord Above. Not that you were even naked, I mean, someone kill me please? Okay maybe not kill me. Knock me out? That'd be okay."

"Iz not ektually hokay," Dimo says. "Hyu is driving. Giff me de vheel und hy knock hyu out as much as hyu vant!" he adds cheerfully.

"... No way in hell. Last time I let a jaeger drive my rig we ended up in a pond. You know what happens when a lava engine ends up in a pond?"

Agatha knows. She winces. "Nice job not getting scalded," she says, and then her eyes fall on the flat, shiny expanse of the scars on his face, crawling up the back of his neck. "Um, unless you did."

"Uh. No, that was before. Old stuff." He sneaks her a furtive look. "Wow. Veli will _flip out_."

"Who _is_ Veli?" she demands, a bit out of patience. She's had a stressful day, alright? "No, better yet, who are you?"

Startled blink. He hesitates as he negotiates a tight turn. "Uh. Right. Sorin Petrescu, m'lady. Traveling blacksmith. Journeyman. And Veli is. Um."

Alright, why is he blushing _again_.

"Is. One of your jaegers?"

She blinks. She didn't expect that.

"Ho! Hyu iz Veli's sveetie! Hy thot it vos sumting like dat. De schmell vos preddy strong."

... Watching Herr Petrescu blush is making her own face prickle in sympathetic embarrassment. She politely looks away, coughs in her fist. Dating a jaeger? Really? Well, it's not like they're all bad people, or anything, but they. Um. Well. She's never really considered any of them in that way, _ever_. It's strange.

"Oh! Oh, I see. Um. I haven't met many of them yet, and the only female jaegers I've seen have been General Gkika and Jenka..."

Dimo laughs, low and almost indulgent. Herr Petrescu groans, eyes squinting almost closed like he knows better than to close them all the way while driving, but only barely.

"Velimir iz a boy jaeger. Dey do the boykissink."

Agatha splutters. But they -- um. She looks him over. Herr Petrescu _is_ a man, right? His voice and his chest, and. Definitely a man.

"I, um. Didn't know that was a possibility. I mean I heard, but I. Huh. This is a little intriguing!"

No, really. At first glance you'd assume this would be rather contrary to natural reproductive instincts, but the jokes she's heard combined with a real-life proof of existence seem to say this is no isolated mutation but a recurring thing; surely there must be other evolutionary advantages if this keeps happening, and Herr Petrescu doesn't seem like much of a -- a strange and twisted pervert -- not that she'd know what to look for... "Do you know if there was a cause or trigger event? Hm. Maybe it's inborn. Fascinating."

Her face is still burning and feels like it might never stop burning, but. Wow. Huh. Boys kissing. She has no intention to consider Herr Petrescu and any of the jaegers she knows, dear heaven, she would die, but --

Gil would certainly know more about the biology of the thing, if it's a phenomenon that has been known to happen unprompted and not a mere ribald joke as she had previously assumed. Or maybe Tarvek, his family has a background in genetic sciences and --

Gil and Tarvek kissing.

 _Huh_.

Another few seconds pass, and then Herr Petrescu says to Dimo in a calm, musing tone, "I don't know why I was expecting any of you guys to be any less than an utter asshole, really."

"Pff. Hyu like us."

"Yes, I have deplorable tastes, case in point. Change of topic right now or you can walk to the next town. Oh hey, here's one! Where am I dropping you off?"

Agatha drags herself away from contemplations of a, ahem, biological nature, cheeks warm enough that she's glad there's all that snow to look at out there, it's almost psychological cooling off and also a nice distraction. "We wouldn't want to inconvenience you..."

"I'm already inconvenienced," he replies around a laugh, "and -- that was Von Blitzengaard, wasn't it?"

"Um, yes."

He spares her a glance, a sudden grin. "Good, I really don't like the guy. Also I've been dumped in the middle of the wilderness before with only a jaeger for company and it's very much not something I'd like inflicting on anyone else, especially in the middle of winter."

Well. She doesn't like involving civilians when she doesn't have to, especially against that blasted _Martellus_ , but if he's offering -- and his forge is really very practical, and...

She glances at Dimo. Does he trust him? Dimo's eyes are half-closed as he scans the road, watchful but resting.

He's still injured. The longer he can sit in a warm place and not have to fight or run, the better off he will be.

Dimo glances at her, glances at Herr Petrescu, arches an eyebrow. She gives an imperceptible nod, furrows her eyebrows. Dimo chuffs out a quiet laugh under his breath and taps the man's hat.

"Nize hat."

Then man rolls his eyes, but he's smiling a little too. "Thanks, it's the first piece of my Taken Straight Off A Jaeger's Head collection, do you want to contribute?"

"Haha, nah, thenk hyu." Dimo makes himself comfortable, chin tucked on his crossed arms on the backrest. "Hy haff to bite hyu iffen hyu touch mine hat, und den hyu boytoy gets all jelus."

"Pff," Petrescu says. "Can't have that."

The way he smiles makes her clear her throat, look away.

"Well! Well. You'll be in trouble if you get us all the way there, but if I could have a look at your maps..."

He digs them out of an overhead compartment, and the three of them spend another ten minutes figuring out an escape route and several contingency plans. It is very productive and at the end of it they are still not being followed, which is a great relief, and totally not an excuse not to go right back to her experiments. Having concluded that the topic is exhausted, she wriggles back into the smithy and gathers her tools and her experiments all over again.

"--And leave the engine alone, lady! Red _fire_ , it took me five years to learn everything it did, I'm done having it spring new surprises on me."

"But you could make your own roads! It'd only require that you drive over rocks for more materials -- ooh, or you could even recycle the road as you made it, if we install a gathering mouth at the back--"

"Short words, m'lady -- _no_."

Sitting against the warm wall of the engine, Dimo tilts his hat back onto his face and reclines into a corner for a nap, quietly laughing at them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "a discussion about children. ( and things RELATED to children, like expectations and emotions that surprise you, and jaeger... children...?)"

"Master Petrescu...?" says the kid he took on recently. (Sorin feels old with how young Pietro seems. He's only thirty-five, for Frig's sake.)

Sorin only looks up from the plow he was hammering into shape when it's in the water, cooling. His apprentice is at the door, looking even more fretty than he's been the whole month he's been living with Sorin.

"There's, uh. A-a Jäger to see you...?"

Frowning, he looks at his plow blade, tries to figure out if cooling all the way down will hurt, if he needs to pause now. Velimir knows not to interrupt when he's in the middle of shaping a piece.

"Where is he?"

"They're, um. By your back door? On the bench."

... They?

Huh. Another Jäger? No, Pietro only mentioned the one. And if anyone were visibly bleeding, Sorin dearly hopes he would think to mention it. The boy isn't stupid, just... timid. Almost broken of giving his opinion on anything, really.

"In your opinion," Sorin says, trying for neutral, for open to discussion, "Did it seem urgent? I can make up the work later; now, should I?"

Pietro chews on his lip. "I, uh."

The kid barely dares to ask him anything about the actual job he is actually supposed to learn from him. When they're working together Sorin has to basically narrate his every move in the hope that something will --

"Yes," Pietro says. "I. I think you should."

Sorin goes.

Velimir is sitting on the bench, in the shade. It's a mildly cloudy day but there is still some sun, and he's there in the shade, hat pulled down so his eyes don't show at all.

He's got a toddler sobbing quietly on his lap. At the other end of the bench there's a girl, seven or eight years old, blonde and brown-eyed, blotchy with tears and rage, glaring sideways at him. He doesn't look back.

He looks up when Sorin pauses at the corner; he says nothing, doesn't smile, doesn't nod.

"Hey, sweetie," Sorin says, and pushes the door to his kitchen open, casually. "You guys coming in?"

What the hell is even going on.

He goes to his pantry ( _his_ pantry, he has a pantry, what is the world coming to) and gets out a hunk of bread, marmalade. He doesn't have milk.

Velimir's hooves clop quietly on the threshold, on Sorin's old oak floor. It's not the first time he's been here but last time he was in and out like a thief in the dark, no time to visit thoroughly and scandalize the neighbors.

(Sorin hopes they wouldn't be _too_ scandalized; the village stands near an university town and they see constructs around fairly often; a handful of them even live here, or on nearby farms, people treat them okay.)

He looks down at the girl and she's standing in the doorway glaring, her eyes flicking to him, to the little boy, to Velimir with hate and fear, and back to him. She's not too sure who Sorin is in this mess. (She's clear on one thing. Velimir is the enemy.)

"Your little brother?" Sorin asks, casual, and spreads marmalade on slices of bread. "Would you help him eat this without getting it all over the place? I bet he's hungry."

Velimir needs stared at meaningfully for another two seconds before he will put the child down on the bench. Poor tyke's chin barely clears the tabletop. He looks limp with exhaustion and confused loss; he just sits there, hunched over.

"Velimir," Sorin says, neutral but for the use of his full name. "C'mon and help me bring in some more wood."

He needs more wood like he needs a second smithy to sandwich his home with and make it an actual sauna. Also the firewood is outside, not further in. The girl scurries to the table the second Velimir is out of the way.

Velimir pulls the door almost closed behind him and sags right there against the stones.

"Sorry," he says, hat tilting so far forward Sorin starts thinking it's going to fall, but it's tucked too far down.

Sorin sighs, and peeks in the crack -- the girl is feeding her brother, also casing the joint -- and then touches Veli's arm, steps into him slow in case he does not want to be held right now.

He does. Sorin endures until his spine cracks, hugs back hard and tight even though he doesn't even get why. It doesn't even really matter why.

"What's going on?"

Velimir breathes out against his shoulder, and then goes, "Hoy dere, honey, Hy iz expecting...?"

Sorin goes pff and rolls his eyes, but mostly because he knew Velimir was hoping for it.

Then he hugs him some more, and he waits.

"Dey iz mine... Great-grand-nephew und niece? Hy think."

"Hmm?"

Then Velimir startles him with a short growl. "Und dey poppa vos like, oh, no, Mechanicsburg iz not good enuff for mine flesh und blood, no! Let us neffer mention again dat hyu haff family _dere_! Und take mine grand-niece und go to live in bloody _Plovhert_."

Sorin blinks. "But Plovhert--"

Velimir leans down just enough for Sorin to see that his teeth are bared. "Razed down last week, yez. Sucky walls, no treaty vith anyone strong enough to protect dem right, but no, a perfect place for descendants!"

Sorin says nothing about how suitable most of the world thinks Mechanicsburg is not.

At least in Mechanicsburg they'd have been ferociously defended from any outside threat. The inside ones, too. It's just the bloody, creepy, insular education they'd have gotten in the bargain...

Velimir sighs, slumps again. "By de time Hy get there, der kids are vith de neighbors because de poppa und mine grand-niece iz dead, but de neighbors still haff six children left alive und no more house either. Dey vos talking orphanages. Good ones, not bad ones, but Plovhert iz going to be _lousy_ vith kids vith no parents after this, so it von't be a big difference. Hy say Hy take care of it."

Sorin chews on his lower lip, takes another peek at the children. The girl is sliding off the bench, eyeing the open door.

"Water jug's in the corner!" he calls casually through the gap, making her flinch guiltily, before quieting his voice again. "I take it they don't have any closer family left?"

Velimir shakes his head, voice rough. "Last of 'em died in de siege of Mechanicsburg vhen Miz Agatha makes her claim. Vos preddy old anyway, good death, und dey vouldn't have been fit for kid wrangling..."

Oh. They're the only family he has left. Estranged or not, they are.

And they're here. In Sorin's kitchen.

Velimir takes off his hat, lets it dangle off his hand, looks at him. He is so _miserable_ , shoulders slumped, ears limp, letting the wall take his weight.

"Und dey think Hy _kidnap_ dem, iz a _mess_."

Sorin pinches his lips. "I'd noticed."

His lover rakes a hand through a shock of pale hair that already looks well-raked. "Und Preia fight me _all de time_ , und leetle Arii doesn't fight me at _all_ , vhich is somehow worse."

Sorin nods. Yeah, that's... about what he figured.

The boy believes Velimir kidnapped him -- probably plans to _eat_ him -- and he's so traumatized that he's just... letting the monster move him around. Good Lord.

"Are you, um, planning to keep them...?"

He's not sure how to tell Veli it's a horrible idea. Even if Jägerkin were any good at raising children, he's a soldier perpetually on the move and the only things resembling a regular address he has are the Jägerhall and Mamma Gkika's bar with the dancing, half-naked ladies.

... Also they're terrified of him. In a few months, maybe, they'll be able to figure out he means them no harm. They're not there yet.

He's a bit glad when Velimir shakes his head, though also guilty, because there's so much exhaustion and hurt in it.

"Hy iz not de... settle down type. Can't be that for them."

"Mm." Sorin pets his hair. It's not anything new to either of them. They did talk it out.

He never did settle down with Sorin. Not in the sense that he left his pack, left his battles, his Mistress, and came to live with Sorin and his daily routine. Not even when the routine included traveling through the wastelands. Sorin is pretty sure that if there was absolutely no other way left, he would try it for the kids -- and it would be a disaster.

There _are_ other ways left, anyway...

Velimir looks up at Sorin, imploring, a hand caging Sorin's hand against his cheek. "Hy don't know vhere else yet, but Hy -- Hy gots enough money for a nurse or, or _someone_ , hy don't know who to ask yet but Hy _vill_ , just -- just. One month? Two, maybe, Hy find somevhere--"

"Two kids at once is a lot of work," Sorin remarks. "Especially when I have a full-time job and a new apprentice." He wonders how Pietro will deal with younger children, especially traumatized ones. Could go either way.

Velimir deflates further, somehow, goes grayer, goes faint. "... Jah. Sorry."

Sorin crooks him a smile and wraps his arms around his neck. "We're lucky the place is lousy with potential babysitters, really."

Velimir's head jerks up. He stares.

He smiles, barely, the glow of his eyelids sparkling oddly off his slightly damp eyes.

"Oh?"

"Mm."

In the kitchen the boy has oozed under the table, is huddled there small and shaky; the girl is peering into drawers. Sorin makes a note to move his knives.

"Hy find dem a good place," Velimir promises. Sorin shrugs.

"Might have some ideas of my own in the meantime too. We'll talk about it again in two months," he says, because not even twenty minutes in he knows better than to say _give them to me, **give** them, they're broken and scared and a little bit yours and I want them to be **mine**_.

He has a pretty good guess that when the two months are over he will be saying it anyway, but there's no reason to be in a rush about that.


	6. Velimir and Lazar, during chapter 3 of Pyroclastic

"So. De forge keed, huh."

Velimir came to a stop with a hoof up on the windowsill, one second before launching out.

When he looked back he already knew what he would see -- Captain Lazar, somehow alone in a room that was somehow suddenly empty. (How the man did that was a mystery for the ages, but Veli couldn't pretend he hadn't seen it happening again and again for... pretty much ever since he decided to take the Jaegerbrau, in fact, before he was even a jaeger.)

"De forge kid," he replied, in as much of a discouraging tone as he could manage against Lazar, which wasn't much. The man was just too... Lazar, Veli ended up sounding like a sullen kid, which was very disheartening, and made him feel like he was sneaking out to seduce the very proper innkeeper's daughter all over again. "Iffen hyu iz here to do de disapproving grandma act, Anton talked mine ears black and blue alreddy. Peace."

Lazar snorted, and tucked his thumbs in his waistband, loose and uncaring. His tail lay coiled on the ground, not held tensely off it. "Nah. Go forth und fuck de townie. Dat one at least iz not scared ov us, or all _titillated_ , und dat's rare enuff."

Velimir gave in and put his hoof back on the floor, turned around, crossed his arms. Frowned. "Hy dun mind people being jealous that Hy gets to tumble a cute boy, but iz not _just_ a--"

"Veli," Lazar cut him off, leveling a long, heavy-lidded stare at him. "Veli. _Hyu vrite to him_. Hyu iz not tellink me anyting new."

... Mnergh. Veli crossed his arms some more. They hadn't gotten uncrossed, but he figured he could always tune it up. He'd been teased about it all day and it was getting old.

Granted he'd also been able to brag all day long about getting laid while everyone else was playing the same old card games with the same old cheating faces, but.

"Iz chust Hy tink... Hy tink hyu iz not aktuelly interested in vhat Hy tink."

"Hy iz not saying anything!" Veli replied, sarcastic, and then groaned a little to himself. Goddamn, he felt a teenager again. Lazar wasn't his dad.

Thank god for that, it would make some of their past interaction pretty disturbing if he were.

Besides he knew the man enough to read that look on his face, subtle as it was. Sadness. Regret.

"Iffen hyu mean about how vhen he dies it vill be bad," Veli said, "Hy already know. But hey," he added with badly faked cheer, "might break up first!"

Lazar sighed philosophically and punched him in the shoulder. "Vell. _Hyu_ might die first."

"Oh, _hey_ ," Velimir replied with much more real cheer.

"Telling sumvun not to be in lurve iz like telling sumvun not to drink de Brau, in mine experience." A shrug. "Hyu vant it, de rest of de world ken hang, und iz verra sad if hyu is held back from it effen if dey say it iz for hyu own good." A considering pause. "Anton is a bitter grump who chases effryun away vith his grump und den goes, see! like dat proves anyting but hiz grumpiness."

Velimir couldn't help laughing. "Dat he iz. Eh, he's still pretty funny. Hy like him!"

"Hyu like effryone."

"Hy do _not_." Lazar arched an impressive eyebrow at him. Veli huffed. "Just because Hy dun let a little bit of surliness get to me..."

"Uh huh."

Veli sighed and placed his hands on his hips. "... Anyting hyu wanted to add to hyu grand lessoning? Hy iz gonna be late for mine date, und hyu iz not de kind of people who'd sabotage a brother getting laid, _are_ hyu?"

It'd be _weird_ if he was. One thing Lazar had never been was petty. Or controlling. Or jealous. Okay, so three things. Other jaegers he could see playfully getting in his way, making him work for it, but not Captain Lazar.

Thankfully, he'd already seen Sorin yesterday, but that didn't mean he didn't want to see him today as fast as possible, either. But if Lazar had gotten in his way yesterday Veli might have taken off running before the end of his first sentence. He wasn't sure if it would have hurt Lazar's feelings or what.

"Hyu dun have to mentor me all de time anymore, hyu know," he added, a bit gentler. Lazar had been the one saddled with Velimir when he survived the Jaegerbrau and was suddenly in possession of a body like a live weapon. He supposed some habits died hard.

"Hy vasn't -- hrrm." Lazar frowned. "Mebbe Hy vos. Sorry. Anyvayz -- haff fun, dun get him caught. Und also, ask him about de bar fight dat vosn't at some point, could be interesting."

Velimir paused once again in the middle of going through the window, turned around with his eyebrows up. "Huh?"

Lazar was already gone, not even the tip of his tail slithering through the door to be seen.

"Vhat de hell vos dat about?" Veli grumbled to himself, and finally launched himself out and onto the nearest rooftop.

He had a boyfriend to woo, and now he would be -- well, not late, they hadn't set a precise time, but. Ten minutes wasted when he could have been beholding Sorin's cute disapproving faces.

He kept turning the mention of that bar fight that wasn't over in a corner of his mind even as he went, though.


	7. Lazar and Sorin, some years past Pyroclastic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for Everlind. ^^

"Jah, Kaptan! De town iz contained. Fonny toys vere all piled opp in..." 

Hm. Not bad, that had gone rather quick. Lazar listened to the list of Spark-made weaponry and desperate improvisation and then nodded, inclined his head toward another of his subordinates for the next rapport.

"Seven suspicious pipple ve find on de roads, going avay real fast. Ve put dem in dat inn, iffen hyu vant a quick look if hyu haff de time."

Sometimes Lazar didn't, and left the evaluation to one of the Baron's clean-up crew, but this scene was hardly that messy. "Ennyvun looks tricky enuff to escape?"

His subordinate looked uncertain. "Hm. Mebbe. No Spark in de lot, Hy iz _almost_ sure, und no speshul training dot meks pipple disappear through walls or somesuch..."

Hm. The fact that he wasn't certain there'd be no more trouble alone... "Tek three more pipple for de guards, und Hy go after Hy make de rounds, mebbe."

Didn't cost much to be cautious.

He circled the town from the rooftops once, then went down on street level to put the fear of jaegers in a too-loud and too-demanding official or other. Night was falling; on the horizon he could see some more of the Baron's zeppelins coming, barely specks yet.

He was right by the inn Freik had said was being used to host the detainees found out of the walls, so he went.

They were being kept in a room the innkeeper reserved for paying customers who wanted more private parties -- solid walls, no windows, and no kitchen instruments to implement a shiv with. Lazar followed his guide, and looked after him through the narrow slot that had been knocked into the door.

"So dese three vos definitely escaping early--" Implying they'd known the attack was coming; suspicious; "und dese two haff sum _nize_ fightin moves--" Considering it was a jaeger paying that compliment, also suspicious," und dese two, Hy dunno. Dis vun might be sum kind ov poacher, und dat vun--"

That one was sitting against a wall and raking a hand through his hair in a way that indicated worry and probably guilt, but the scar on his face indicated that it was a good time for Lazar to let out a long sigh.

"Get me dat one out und in de office. _Gentle-like_."

Might be a bit alarming to be suddenly singled out and descended upon by a pair of malevolently grinning jaegers, but Lazar figured the young man could handle it, and also the actual spies in the room deserved to spend time wondering what other, sneakier player they'd missed in their little head games.

The innkeeper's office had a very nice chair. Lazar sat in it with a little sigh, tail draped over the padded armrest. Wasn't like his body even remembered what it was to be old, but his mind did, with all the responsibilities weighing him down and not a second to take part in the blood-pumping, happy-making mayhem part of warfare. No, he was stuck _supervising,_ and only fighting a tiny little bit.

"Iz here, sir!" Venceslaw barked, saluting, and propelled Velimir's boyfriend of a couple years now into the room.

"Hoy," Lazar said in phlegmatic, half-hearted rebuke, and didn't enlighten either one of them. Just because the kid was an in-law of sorts didn't mean he ought to suddenly benefit from zero suspicion... That would be pretty bad if any outsider noticed. "Chust get out. Und hyu, sit down."

The human sat in the chair in front of the desk, cautious but already a little relieved to see him, a little looser in the spine. Kid had no poker face worth a damn, it was a wonder he hadn't been shanked while in custody.

"So hyu iz de vun vhat sends de Baron a heads-up."

It didn't even need to be a question, but Sorin twitched anyway. " _How'd_ you --"

"Hy _haff_ herd of hyu before," Lazar replied drolly, and then sighed through his nose. "Also, Veli brags."

The kid pinked instantly, and ducked his head to hide (too late) a smile. "...Oh." He cleared his throat, face falling. "Well. Yeah. I mean -- you've got to have seen..."

Words seemed to fail him. Lazar shrugged, tilted his head. He'd seen, indeed. Had seen worse in his time, some perpetrated by his own Masters, even, but it was indeed pretty gruesome and not anywhere close to being on the Baron's list of approved uses for redundant peasant children.

"Dat's taken care ov. Doctors und nurses are dere, should be fine." Probably wouldn't be fine for a while, if ever, but Sorin didn't seem to even think Lazar might be lying to him, and relaxed all the way into his chair with a sigh.

"Alright. That's... good to know. Thank you."

"Mm."

Lazar flicked the tip of his tail as he watched him, eyebrows furrowed in thought. The kid was smart enough; he was just so _young_. Must have been on his own only, what... two years? Three? And alone, to boot; he needed a traveling band to integrate with...

Only humans did things differently. Lazar sighed. He even knew which squad he'd put him with if the kid were a jaeger, but he _really_ wasn't.

"Got a piece of advice. Hyu vant, or is hyu going to run off again?"

The kid flushed again. "I was drunk, that doesn't -- _argh_. Sure. Yes. Thank you."

Lazar snorted, and smiled briefly. "Vhen hyu blow de vhistle next time--" because unless he got himself eaten by a fire-breathing hedgehog there _would_ be a next time-- "either hyu send hyu report from de next town over, or _hyu dun leave right afterwards_."

The kid squirmed a little. Not enough that most people would notice, but Lazar had been giving people talking-tos for a while. "I didn't expect the Baron to respond so fast!" He hunched his back a little. "I know that, but I couldn't wait that long, and then I thought, the town felt weird and..."

Lazar watched him chew on his lip for a while, trying to put words on something.

"Like it would be really bad to be an outsider once they found out someone had tattled? I mean, the locals are usually very friendly -- very welcoming, but it's the kind of welcoming where they like you visiting but they _really_ don't want you to stay. If that makes any sense."

Lazar snorted. "Hy know de breed." Well. Not entirely thoughtless then. Just miscalculated. "Hokay. For de record, next time hyu write him reports about tortured children, plan for de Baron responding chust about dat fast. Effen if he chooses sneaky und hyu dun see it -- chust about dat fast iz good benchmark for it."

Sorin chuckled noiselessly, head still bowed. "Noted, sir."

"But seriously next time mind hyu cover more, or pipple vill know hyu iz spying for de Baron und be verra angry at hyu."

The kid bristled pretty much all over. "I'm _not_ \--"

... Heh. Cute. Holding himself back, deflating. Lazar didn't move an inch.

"I'm not _spying_ ," he said with wounded dignity that had Lazar repressing a smirk. "If they don't want me to say anything about the _criminal_ things they do then maybe they shouldn't be _doing them_."

Lazar said nothing, very pointedly, for a handful of seconds, and then nodded. "Hyu realize in about ten minutes de spies in holding right now vill be persuaded hyu iz de Baron's questor, right?" A wince. Good. "Becuz suddenly hell falls on dem, und den Hy -- de officer in charge -- take hyu from holdings und hyu neffer come back or iz seen again in de prisoners pens... Until sum months or years later, somevhere else, _vhere_ _de same ting happens_."

The kid scowled, mulish. "If I see something like that again, I'm going to tell someone again, but it's not like I go looking for these things!"

... The funniest thing was that he seemed to honestly believe it. Like everyone was that curious, and that observant, and that able to piece things together and not hide their own face from the possibility of how bad it could really be, and they just chose to deliberately not find out for sure.

Hunting hounds didn't _choose_ to smell every prey animal inside their radius either.

"Hy iz not telling hyu to stop doing it, or to do it more. Hy iz telling hyu to do it _better_." He straightened up, climbed back to his feet. Sorin imitated him, scrambling upright in a hurry. "Mind hyu cover. Alvays. Fat lot of good this does de next town over iffen hyu get hyuself killed being stupid after de previous one."

Sorin sighed, dredged up a rueful smile. "Can't let any potential rescuees down? But apart from that, no pressure."

"If hyu vill not look out for hyu for _hyu_ , at least tink of de orphans," Lazar said, deadpan. The kid stared at him for a whole three seconds before he burst out laughing.

"Yessir," he chuckled, ducking his head again, and followed Lazar to the door. "Never mind that I'm a _blacksmith_ , not a _hero_..."

About to pull the door open, Lazar stopped to grimace. "Devil forbid."

"... Or an actual, you know, _professional sneak_ either..."

Ah, that kid. Heh. Holding the door closed a second longer, Lazar smirked down at him, faint and amused. "No, chust a natural vun."

"Hey!"

"Vith no training at all. Hy dun suppose hyu vant me to recommend hyu...?"

And that was an entertaining shudder, and an even more entertaining look of horror on his face. "Um. Thank you very much, but very much no."

Such a bad liar. Lazar faked a sigh. "Ach. Den again, hyu blush like a virgin boy in a brothel. Probably not de best choice after all."

He finally opened the door, and led the spluttering human out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adi: "Hy haff herd of hyu before,” Lazar replied drolly, and then sighed through his nose. “Also, Veli brags.”  
> What the hell does Veli even say to have Lazar have this reaction XDDDD  
> Askerian: "my boyfriend once brained an agent of the mail with a spanner or somesuch and tried to hijack the air balloon"  
> Adi: hahahahaha  
> Adi: ah, I see  
> Askerian: "my boyfriend drove a clank at *several* lava spewing clanks"  
> Askerian: "i met my boyfriend when he was sneaking like a sneak through a spark's underground lair"  
> Askerian: "veli shut up"  
> Askerian: "he is so fucking adorable when he's angry ahhh"  
> Askerian: "veli, shut UP"  
> Askerian: "he makes the cutest grumpyfaces too"  
> Adi: so basically if you listen to Veli Sorin is the coolest thing to ever happen on this earth short of Mechanicsburg/the Heterodyes  
> Askerian: hahahaha  
> Askerian: the CUTEST mostly  
> Askerian: baby badass  
> Adi: XDDDD awww  
> Askerian: still baby XD  
> Adi: well, he *is* pretty young compared to Veli's peer group XD  
> Askerian: just a bit XD  
> Askerian: veli you dirty old man


	8. the one where sorin and veli do the light bdsm porn thing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is porn and dorks in love. The porn contains bondage and spanking, kink discussion/negotiation, and anal sex. The dorks in love contain two dorks being gross and cute and laughing too damn much.

It's their second winter, and Velimir feels free to congratulate himself for having gotten Sorin that lava engine for his traveling forge, because he goes straight from hooves tight and achy with snow to lung-unfurling warmth, like the things inside his chest are tropical plants in full bloom.

He kicks snow off from between his split hooves and drops his sodden trousers across the anvil. Sorin blinks up from his seat at the tiny unfolding table in the far corner; he's got ink on his nose that's the same color as his riot of curls and ahh, it's short in the back again. All that delicious bare nape.

"Um."

"Hy iz melting," Veli informs him, and rubs snowflakes-now-water out of his hair with his vest, which he drapes across the pants.

Clad in nothing but his underclothes, he goes to Sorin and kisses his upturned face. "Surprise!"

Then he lowers the bed from the wall, locks the chains, and burrows under the covers.

"... So I guess I don't have to finish your letter, then?"

Veli tucks the blankets around his face, so that his ears are properly covered. The blankets are toasty from being pressed against the wall. "No, hyu still haz to. Gimme when Hy leave."

Sorin laughs, the quiet kind that shakes his body more than it makes sound. "Okay, then. I wasn't writing it now, anyway, I was doing my taxes."

"Boo."

"Bed hogs don't get a right to boo."

"Hy iz not bed hog, hy iz bed warmer." He strikes a sexy pose, flutters his eyelashes.

"You realize you're still under the blankets, right?"

Veli grins. He thinks he's starting to defrost, but that might be wishful thinking. "Trying to entice hyu to unveil me. Working yet?"

He knows he looks silly as hell, hair wet and all over his face, hat askew -- he takes it very carefully off to hang it beside the bed; it starts dripping onto the floor instantly. Sorin snorts quietly, smiling at him.

"I think you should give it another half-hour. I've got to finish these, anyway, or I'll forget where I stopped and completely lose track of everything. You go and hog the bed."

"Dat vos mine evil plan all along," Velimir says, eyes already closing. "Muahaha."

He's not exactly sleepy, but the warmth is knocking him into a daze. He curls up for fifteen minutes or more, soaking it up, before he stretches his legs out and wiggles the toes of his hooves against the sheets.

Before he can get unfolded all the way he bumps into a little compartment thing in the wall, which clicks open with the impact. "Whoops."

Okay, time to tunnel under the blankets, then. (He can hear Sorin failing not to laugh. Success.)

The drawer didn't spill anything much; it's a simple matter to nudge it back into its rail and push it... closed...

"Shackles?"

He thought Sorin didn't like working for -- well, for anyone who might plan to use shackles on anyone else. Of course if the customer is insistent enough and refusing would be dangerous Sorin would probably rather make them a pair, but. Velimir frowns, lifting them out of the drawer. The edges have been sanded down to a smooth finish so they won't dig into skin, and they...

They're pretty big, aren't they. He's pretty sure most people's hands would slip through them, with enough force and stubbornness.

Also there's this strange little latch on the side...

Oh.

He looks up at Sorin, who is staring back at him and looking utterly mortified.

"Okay, first things first I want you to know it was just to see if I could, because the mechanism was a pain. And I could, it was a great triumph."

He closes his mouth, teeth clacking a little. They stare at each other.

"De second thing?" Velimir presses delicately, heroically keeping a monster fit of laughter contained.

"... What?"

"You sez first things first. Okay, und second things?"

Sorin groans, hides his face in his hands. "Oh, just laugh and get it over with!"

Veli is grinning and doesn't think he'll be able to stop anytime soon. "Hyu know," he says, lifting the shackles, eyeballing the diameter, "Hy iz fine vith playink vith der non-tricky shackles, too. So long az de key iz not akseeduntohlly lost."

Sorin lifts his head to glare at him for his weaponized use of Old Mechanicsburger accent. Veli makes sure Sorin can see him place his wrist in the open shackle, makes sure Sorin is staring short of breath and stiff with surprise before he closes it with a snap.

He hopes Sorin was right and the release does work, because he might be going around with a fun bracelet for a little while otherwise. Oh well.

The noise that comes from Sorin next is a thin, aspirated, nasal whine. Velimir bursts out laughing.

Ach, his poor sweetie. Veli imagines him, lonely one night, bored, having _thoughts_... lots of indecent thoughts, bad enough that his so proper, so easily embarrassed lover actually gets up and _builds the thing_.

It _is_ hilarious. It's also the sexiest thing he's heard in a long, long time.

"So hyu like these things, huh?" he says, musing, lifting his wrist to inspect the manacle. It's nicely heavy, and he was right, not a single edge inside to catch his skin. A human might bruise wearing something so heavy and unyielding, but ...

"You're the one who mentioned them!" Sorin splutters.

Velimir blinks. "Hy did? Vhen?"

"I quote, oh no, you have me at your mercy now, what will you do, sexy torture?" Sorin lets out a harassed, explosive sigh. "And then when I said I was low on shackles you made that -- that _sad face_."

Velimir stares for a second, three, twenty.

That... was from the very first time they were together, the _first_ time, in that stupid transport... and come to think of it, it was also nicely toasty inside.

"Hyu has been thinking ov it _ever since_?"

Sorin gives him an anguished look. "No!" A pause. "Maybe. Not, not _often_. Just. Anyway someone reminded me at the bar with a particularly bad ribald joke I won't repeat and. Auuugh."

He crumples in his chair, face hidden in his hands.

Velimir contemplates the situation. Not for long; he's a jaeger, he's good at going with the flow. He jiggle the chain, just enough for Sorin to look up, despite himself, like his eyes are magnetized.

"Hyu vill never capture me," he says, all soft and intense, shifting his weight so that the blankets slide and fall off his body.

The chair crashes to the ground. Sorin has tackled him.

The chains holding up the bed creak as they wrestle, Sorin on top of him, reaching for the other shackle. He kneels on the chain and Veli allows it to restrain his caught arm, tugs but doesn't tug free.

He's in his underclothes and Sorin is still dressed. Hmph. That is highly unfair. He wriggles to place a hoof on Sorin's chest and shove him backward -- he'll let him pin him again later but the clothes have got to go!

Only the whole bed shudders under them and when he pauses to assess the stability of the whole thing Sorin doesn't and tackles him again.

Clang. One of the support chains flies free -- something metallic pings off the other wall, skitters out of sight -- and Veli rolls out of bed, blankets and all, before he can finish ruining it.

He ends up on his butt in the middle of the thankfully well-swept floor, looking up at Sorin still on the bed, lip quivering with a chagrined laugh.

A harassed look passes over Sorin's face -- and then his eyes fall on the chain that Velimir dragged off the bed with him, the shackle, and he goes, "You know what, to hell with this, I'll solder it back on tomorrow."

Distracted by his sudden bout of laughter, legs tangled in the blankets he brought along in his graceless escape, Velimir gets tackled for real.

His shackled arm gets pulled up; he squirms, doesn't try very hard to fend Sorin off, but he's not sure what -- and now Sorin is pinning his other arm with his knee.

Snickt. Locked. Both arms caught.

When he tugs, the chain goes taut.

He cranes his head back onto the floor. Great rampaging kangaroos, Sorin _chained him to the anvil_.

Something hot grabs his guts, knots them all together with sudden need.

He could get free. He knows that. He could drag the anvil if he had to, it's not bolted down that securely, he could tear it free. The manacles have those trick releases almost in easy reach of his fingers and anyways there's no bar keeping his hands from touching the opposite shackle. He's not really...

... He's not really...

He gives it a good yank, and growls from the guts and up, a long, rattling noise that would have made his throat raw back when he was human.

Sorin is straddling his waist, and Velimir stares up at him, and knows he's glowing as bright as his body has the ability to glow.

He's not sure what to say. He doesn't _want_ to speak, he wants to growl and fight the chains (not for real) and feel Sorin's hands on him and -- things. He wants to bare his teeth and be pinned down anyway.

"Still having fun?" Sorin asks him, but his voice is low, thick.

Veli closes his teeth long enough to give a tight twitch of a nod.

"Good for you, because I'm keeping you until I'm done."

He's a little strangled, awkward, and Veli is almost glad when he doesn't try to keep it up -- Sorin can't pretend worth a damn, he'd slip up and blush and laugh and -- he's yanking the laces out of Velimir's undershirt, pushing it open.

Velimir tugs on the chain, feels the steel press against his forearms. It's not cold, like he halfway expected, it's room temperature. It's weird. Distracting.

He's still growling, a rolling thing that seesaws like a purr. He _could_ stop, only every time he hits the lowest notes Sorin's knees tighten on his waist.

Sorin undoes Veli's pants next, arranges the blankets around and under him and Veli isn't pushing the pretend far enough to fight him on that, to kick out. (He'd probably stop enjoying himself if his legs were restrained as well.) He lifts his hips off the floor to allow it, gone silent, watching Sorin with eyes that glow.

Sorin just rests a hand on his thigh and caresses his way up Velimir's side, pushing the shirt open wider.

"Vhat's the plan?" Velimir asks, voice rough, watching him with narrowed eyes (half play, half instinct.)

"You don't need to know that, do you?" Sorin replies almost absently, and leans down to kiss his chest, still looking up at him. "You really just need to stay put, and I took care of that for you."

A pause. He sits astride Velimir's thighs.

"Or you can squirm, if you'd rather."

... Fuck.

Sorin doesn't even do anything for a while, just runs his hands up and down Veli's sides, his ribs, the places where his pectoral muscles flow into his shoulders. He runs them up and down, up and down and it should be soothing, only Veli is not in any mood to be soothed.

It's maddening. It's maddening and it makes his skin tingle with want, with expectation of more pressure, of another path for those hands to take, of _nails_.

Back and forth, back and forth.

He bucks. Sorin leans back, all his weight on Velimir's hips. Velimir could hold him up three days if he wanted; he lets himself fall back under his weight with a disgruntled grunt. His dick is trapped under Sorin's clothed ass, which is a gigantic tease. The cloth is thick and raspy and the sensations it gives him are both too much and not enough, almost unpleasant. Better than nothing?

"You're kind of brattish," Sorin observes, and slaps him in the ribs with zero warning.

It's more noise than pain, just a shock; he gasps. Oh lord. Sorin isn't a pacifist but he doesn't love brawls like Veli does, he doesn't like to--

"Huh! Did you actually like that?"

Velimir turns his face away, scowling. Sorin leans in until Veli can feel his breath along his cheekbone.

"Li'l tap like dat? Hy ken take it."

He's sort of expecting another slap, though he wasn't expecting it on his thigh; it's weaker, as Sorin had to hit blind behind his own body.

"I don't care if you can _endure_. Do you like it?"

"... Mnrgh."

The _jerk_ starts rolling his hips, long and slow like a boat at sea, ass gliding against his prick.

"I'm not asking you if you want me to do it again. I'm the one who decides either way."

It's hard to tell what Sorin is feeling from his voice, it has gone all fey, all calm and -- and. Not the Madness Place but it holds odd echoes of the tone that precedes it, usually.

Veli could probably tell from looking at his face, but he's busy staring at his own biceps.

"Whether I do it... or not..."

Sorin is leaning in, close enough for Veli to feel his warmth, not close enough to touch. The tease. The _brat_.

"But hey... Do you know you're blushing?"

Veli splutters, turns his head to glare. "Hy iz _not!_ "

Sorin flicks his chest with a nail, just under his nipple. Veli makes a noise through his nose that is not subtle at all.

Sorin is smiling a little, but not as wide and mean as Veli vaguely expected, even as he couldn't quite imagine it. Veli should have trusted in that. Not a single sadistic bone in the boy's body.

Well. Maybe a _little_ bone.

The rest of his skeleton is made entirely of bossy bone, though.

"Hmm." Sorin raises a hand, palm flat, fingers together, and Velimir braces for something that wouldn't even tickle in battle. Then he lowers his hand to trace an old scar instead.

"Oh, _curse_ hyu!"

"Something you want?"

"No!"

"Good. I wouldn't give it to you anyway."

Velimir growls again from the guts, teeth bared. Sorin stares down at him and brings his hand down sharply on the side of his waist.

"--Hff, damn--" He tries to reach for Sorin and the chains bring him to a stop, and for a second he almost does strain seriously against them. But no, it wouldn't be -- fair, right, good. With a huff, he settles back down onto the floor.

"Tell me if you like it or not," Sorin says, again, still straddling his hips and still giving no sign that he notices the hard shaft rubbing against the seat of his pants.

"Yes! Yes, fine, Hy do, _now_ vhat."

Sorin arches an eyebrow down at him. It's his 'the customer wants _what_ ' face. The one where what they want is stupid enough it's getting funny, though, not the unamused one, which would be pretty cringe-inducing and, okay, maybe good also...

"What else?" he asks, placing his hands flat on Veli's chest, and digging his nails in. He goes slow, careful, checking the depth, and Velimir lets himself growl again, only this growl has gone throaty, expectant. "Good?"

"Mnh. Yes."

"I'd need a knife to make you bleed," Sorin says thoughtfully, looking down at the raised welts his nails leave all of three seconds before Velimir's healing kicks in. Velimir tenses, but Sorin continues, "Yeah, that's not happening."

"Oh. Good."

He's short of breath and dizzy suddenly and he's not sure why, nothing has been happening that should be so overwhelming.

A knife. No. That would go bad. Never that, not with Sorin. But Sorin would never. He wouldn't.

A blade. No, Velimir _would_ fight. Might still fuck, even then, but it wouldn't be good, it wouldn't be loving, it'd be -- revenge. Battlefield, the aftermath. Not that --

"... Shh."

His growls have gone up in pitch, and he closes his throat, closes his air rather than keep making _that_ noise. Closes his eyes.

Hands on his body, broad palms, rough calluses, strong fingers. No nails at all.

"Still yes?" Sorin asks him a minute or two later. Velimir forces his eyes open, nods short and determined. Wouldn't it be _stupid_ if he-- "You sure?" Sorin says, gently. "I have it on good authority that some people push themselves too far and then they regret it."

Veli laughs, he can't help it. "Ach, mine own words, turned against me." He smiles back. "I'm sure." He is, now.

"No accent!" Sorin exclaims. "That is verra believable. Hy beleev eet."

"Hy dun talk like dat!"

"You totally do."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

"Do you want a spanking?"

Velimir can _tell_ he's blushing this time around. Sorin's stern look falls -- surprise, and then, oh darn, Veli can't look at him, can't meet his eyes, wow, that sure is an interesting hammer over there.

" _Huh_."

"Shutup--"

Sorin shifts his weight, goes up on his knees; a sharp slap to Veli's hip silences him.

"... Okay, I can work with that. Slaps okay?"

Veli hesitates. "... Not de face." He feels like a wuss. It's not like it would hurt.

"Noted. Nails okay?"

"Mnh." Goddamn. He is the one who used to insist that Sorin tell him the second anything felt slightly off so they could stop. He was so certain that he would be fine with anything the cute virgin out-of-towner could bring to bed with him. It's _embarrassing_. "Yes."

"Blades, _hell_ no."

"Mnh."

Sorin leans down, brushes a kiss against his cheekbone, smiles against his skin. "And you'd better not suddenly mention a passion for branding, you will be sleeping out in a snow bank."

It's _really_ not the mention of branding that makes him shudder. Sorin still spends a few seconds staring at him like Velimir just admitted he finds lava-spewing clanks erotic.

"De _snow!_ " Veli snaps, cheeks burning an ugly brown.

"Oh. Huh." He actually pauses to consider it. "Dunno how long it'll stay snow in here," he says, casual and vaguely curious. Velimir tries to buck him off again.

Sorin moves off him, and Velimir feels stupid for two seconds, and then -- slaps to his sides, to the outside of his thighs. To the inside of one, and the impact zings straight up to his crotch.

"Do you want me to dump you in a snowbank?"

"No!" Veli growls, teeth bared, more out of mortification than anger. "Hy vant--"

A hand presses on his collarbone, pushes him back down, blunt nails digging into the meat at the junction of shoulder and neck.

"You want to _keep still_."

Velimir licks lips that suddenly feel dry, nibbles on one of them. He knows he's glowing hard, he can see the reflection on Sorin's winter-pale skin.

His hand is so close to his neck.

Veli wouldn't choke if he was hung by his neck for a _week_. He still doesn't want to ask Sorin to put his hand there and squeeze, not even a little, not even in play, and it's not because he wouldn't like it.

 _Sorin_ wouldn't like it. He might do it anyway, but out of duty, not out of desire, and that -- that would make it feel wrong, would kill all the excitement.

"Snow?"

"Cold things," Velimir grits out. "Just -- startling, quick touching, schmall places, not -- not _bathing_ in it, dat's not--"

"Hm. I see." Velimir sees him glancing to the side at the door, as if measuring distances, whether he wants to get up and go fill a bucket with snow right now. Velimir feels so stupid he wants to squirm. He brings up his knees, hooves finding purchase against bolts in the floor, ready to brace.

His elbows are about level with his head, his hands curled so that they can almost touch his hair. He likes the slack, even if he can't do much with it, can't touch anywhere useful, anywhere at all. If he couldn't move at all --

Sorin's hand, from the knee down his tibia, to his heel, exploring the tendons at the back, the underside. "You're not going to be ticklish here, hm."

Yeah. No. It's still skin, not fur -- he doesn't have any fur at all, just the normal level of body hair -- but it's not an elongated foot he has anymore either, it's all raw bone and tendons like a mountain goat's back leg.

He's not even sure why Sorin is fondling his leg, giving it a tug until Velimir allows it to be taken off the floor, folded up, the underside of his hoof tapped with a cautious finger.

"Hyu measurin' me for shoes, farrier-boy?" he says, clipped, head raised off the floor to check on what Sorin thinks he's doing.

Sorin flicks his thigh in punishment, the other hand still holding his hoof. "I'm touching you where I want to touch you."

His fingers are on the hard part of his hoof, Velimir can tell, but he can barely feel it.

"And I was wondering about belling you. You like to startle me too much as it is."

Velimir flushes a little. Iron soldered straight around his ankle is a bit too... Well, he kind of -- it's an oddly intriguing thought -- so _possessive_ \-- but he doesn't think he wants ...

"Another day, maybe," Sorin finishes, and puts Veli's hoof back down, and then he pulls his shirt and undershirt off over his head.

Velimir is totally in favor of this new development.

Sorin leans in and of course feels the need to glide his hands up Veli's entire body from knees to shoulders, hands wide open, pressing so that Veli can feel the calluses, and then he puts his weight on Veli's shoulders and leans in to finally kiss him.

It's hungry, but restrained, barely. Veli tugs on the shackles, wanting to hold him and knowing he can't. He growls a little into Sorin's mouth and gets his lip bitten, caught between dull, flat teeth. He doesn't even think of trying to bite back.

Sorin moves to his neck, doing his best to mark him, one side then the other one, and Veli groans because he's usually the one leaving hickeys and flat on his back like this he can't move to burrow in Sorin's neck. It's not fair.

Collarbones and the meaty muscle over them, neck to shoulder, one side and the next, and he groans. "Hyu gonna do mine whole body like dat?" Sorin bites down on his shoulder, doesn't even bother answering, keeps going at his own pace.

"Hy go _crazy_ if hyu do dat everywhere," he complains, eyes closed, breathing just a touch too fast. It feels good and nice and a little bit evil. He knows patience, he knows teasing, teasing is fun -- when he's the one doing it, mostly, or when he knows it's not going to last much longer past his first complaint, a flash of a proud grin and then hands on his crotch, a mouth taking him in.

Sorin's not even _answering_. Just mouthing away, inch by inch, lips and teeth -- following the fan of muscles down his shoulder and into his chest, where it's _almost_ his armpit and so sensitive.

"Doesn't it smell down dere -- ngh."

Nails dig into his ribs, drag down to his waist. Sorin nips him. He kisses his biceps, a hand gliding back up along Velimir's forearm, touching the shackle, pinning his wrist back to the floor with it. Veli tugs on the other manacle, making the chains rattle, but when Sorin puts his hand on that elbow he lowers it back down with hardly a nudge from his captor.

He's seriously going to go crazy at some point, but going crazy would involve talking himself into believing he can't actually break the chains and flip Sorin onto his back and have his way with him, because if he did -- no. No, he couldn't, it'd be cheating, it'd be -- _disappointing_ , he'd disappoint Sorin, and he can't --

"Hey -- hey. Aren't hyu bored ov dat now. Aren't--"

He still doesn't expect it when Sorin sits up, and he's blinking dumbly and feeling cold and not-being-touched when the flat of a hand cracks against his hip.

" _Ah_."

He says nothing else, doesn't yell, just that -- surprise, can't help it. Ah.

A fleeting kiss against the bridge of his nose.

Another slap -- his thigh. Outside. His prick is so hard it's leaking, balls tight, but Sorin is not -- Veli is not being sat on anymore and nothing is touching him there, and when Sorin shuffles entirely off him he whines a protest.

It's more relief than anything that makes him make a noise when his knee is pushed up and a square, callused hand cracks against the back of his thigh.

It's not anywhere near the first time he ends up on his back with Sorin between his thighs, not even the first time his knees end up slung over his shoulders -- bent in two, hips rolled a little off the ground, but it feels. It. His arms can't brace him -- Veli could kick, strangle Sorin with his thighs, he could do all manners of things but _he can't_. Can't, won't, caught and pinned, held vulnerable and open, and his skin tingles with waiting and need and nerves. With want, please, _please_ \--

Sorin leans down to kiss his face, pressing Veli's knees to his chest -- it's hard to breathe, such a light kiss, no tongue, no teeth; he groans, come _on_ , and then Sorin is guiding himself down, the head of his prick sliding against his taint, lower.

The head pops inside -- dry, it stretches him rough and aching, it's fine, he can deal, he can't _wait_ \-- and then Sorin sits back on his heels and slaps the back of his thigh again, as close to his ass as he can get at.

The chains clang. Veli just arched off the floor. Oh. He lets himself fall back, then tries to rock -- his skin sticks to the floor, so warm in here, he's all sweaty.

He's talking too, but it's nothing but "more" and "please" repeated at random, a tangle of whispers that end up losing all meaning.

Bright sharp impacts. Skin awake, alive, burning, he can feel handprints on him (wishes they would _stay_ ), he can feel the _air_ , the dry heat rolling from the banked engine.

Sorin is rocking himself deeper into him, slow and patient, and Veli chokes -- sobs -- something like that, a tight-throated despairing noise. He needs to -- he needs something, he doesn't know what, this forever. More? His prick aches; he clamps down on Sorin inside him, gets bone-deep bruises in the shape of fingers on his hips for his trouble, gets his thigh _bitten_.

And then more slaps, more -- he's getting _spanked_ , it's ridiculous, he's ridiculous for wanting it, a childhood punishment that should have stayed there and it feels --

Sorin's body presses down on him -- mouth to his mouth, and his prick is trapped between his own thighs and Sorin's belly and hard thrusts, friction, so deep and -- impact, hips on ass, not sharp enough to sting, not quite, not --

Another slap, and he explodes, splattering all over his own chest.

It only takes Sorin another minute, once he has pulled out, to pump himself to completion over Veli's thighs.

He's not done helping Veli's legs off his shoulders and back onto the floor that Veli gets an attack of giggles.

"Dearest," Sorin says dryly, smiling with his eyes and his lips doing a very bad job of pretending they don't want to follow. "What on Earth is the matter with you now."

" _Spanking_ ," is all Veli finds strength to wheeze out, busy as he is laughing himself breathless.

"... That is certainly what happened, yes...?"

He leans over Veli to trigger the release mechanisms, freeing his wrists. Veli leaves them where they are until Sorin lifts one of them cautiously out of the open shackle to check for redness or cut skin. He finds, of course, nothing, but the tenderness settles Veli down, smothers the laughter until only a few random chuckles are coming out.

"I just -- thot -- de goot Father -- village school." Pfffff. "Last time Hy vos spanked."

The look on Sorin's face has him laughing all over again. Sorin looks bemused -- smiling, but because Velimir is laughing, not because he gets it, and a little worried too.

"Are you telling me you -- oh Lord above, before you were turned? How old even were you. Did you get -- no, I don't want to know--"

"No!" Veli says, snickering, and tugs him down to cuddle on the blankets. Sorin lowers himself down beside him gingerly, staring at his face with wary fascination. "I thot of his face if he spanks me now und Hy get all like _dat_."

"Oh."

He looks a little relieved, but like he's not sure he should be yet. This is the same man who just chained him down, folded him in two, and reddened the ass he was simultaneously reaming. Veli loves him so much it's stupid. He breathes out, relaxes, smiles. "Vhen Hy vos a kid Hy hated it, promise. Just a silly thought."

Sorin rolls his eyes at him fondly, and leans on his elbow to look at him, pressed against Veli's side. He'd draped Veli's left hand over his stomach when he was done checking it out but the other arm is still curved over Veli's head, wrist still resting in the open shackle, and Veli can see his eyes catching on that.

"So you never... asked anyone else to do that since then?" he asks, and his voice comes out a little bit rough, a little bit low. Velimir breathes deep, nostrils flaring, holds it for a few seconds before he releases it slowly; smiles.

"Just a couple of slaps here und dere," he assures him quietly. "Hy knew it feels nice, but nothing _that_ nice. Hy like de rough things, but today was..." Was. Wow, he doesn't even have words. "Nice," he says eventually, a mildly ridiculous understatement.

Sorin leans over him and slides a hand up to his wrist, closes his fingers around the place Veli can almost still feel the shackle if he tries. Kisses him, slow and thorough and deep.

"Good," he growls, and he's blushing and looks a little confused, a little shaken by the strength of his own reaction, of the _mine_ Veli can hear in it.

They cuddle, sweaty skin to skin, exhausted and warm and nice.

"So hyu didn't mind?" Veli thinks to ask a good five minutes later. Sorin's eyes are closed, his cheek smushed on Veli's shoulder. He grunts.

"Mind what, getting to have my way with you? I didn't even get all the way down, and that's without mentioning I only got to explore your front."

Veli chuckles, groans a little. "Hyu iz still planning to finish dat? Oh noooo."

"Oh _yes_."

He doesn't even open his eyes, but he still smirks up at Velimir.

"So evil," Velimir says admiringly.

Sorin hums. "The evilest."

A short, thoughtful pause, and then he cracks an eye open.

"... I think I'll still wait a little before bending you over the anvil and going to town on your butt cheeks," he says drolly. "On account of I have to be able to _work_ there, you know."

Velimir laughs and laughs and laughs, and rolls over on top of him to shower his spluttering face in kisses.

\--

They bed down on the floor, as they usually do when Veli spends the night. Veli has to roll on top of Sorin and fake falling back asleep immediately to keep his lover from getting up in the middle of the night and repairing the broken bed right then and there.

Even then it mostly works because Sorin starts laughing at how silly the whole situation is, not because he's feeling any less guilty about making the poor broken bed wait. Goddamn, but Veli loves this man, ridiculousness and all.


	9. Ludy Is Told

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happens a week after chapter 5.

Sorin had been juggling the apprentice and the kids for only a week when his sister blew into town. Sorin figured it out when someone cheerfully shouted, "Hey, Sorin!" from the outside, and Arii rushed crying right into the dark, fire-and-stabby-things-filled smithy. 

Pietro dropped his broom with a clatter and blocked the toddler's way bodily, hands held up like he was wary of touching him. Sorin put the file and iron nails down and went to pick up the child before he stopped wobbling uncertainly and managed to wedge himself in a corner between two stacks of heavy, none-too-stable iron ingots.

"Um--"

"I've got him." Arii was trying to turn into a hedgehog in his arms, or maybe a small boulder. "Good job, Pietro." His apprentice lowered his arms, unsure.

"What do you think scared--"

" _Helloooo!_ "

... Yeah, subtle. "Coming!" Sorin called back, and, signaling Pietro to come along, he walked out.

As he came out Preia came in at a gallop from wherever she'd been sneaking to while Arii played on the paved stones where Sorin could see him. She braked hard, threw the unknown woman and her companion a suspicious glare, and sidled sideways until she could stand beside and a little before Sorin and her brother. Sorin sighed again, and then smiled. "Hey, Ludy."

It didn't take him more than a glance to figure out what had terrified the kid. Sorin's sister had an actual _claymore_ strapped on her back, and the young man hovering behind her at the edge of the courtyard rested his weight onto something that was pretty obviously a war spear. (He also had just about the darkest brown skin Sorin had seen on a natural-born, unaltered being, though people from India and Africa were hardly unheard of this close to Beetleburg and its great university; the issue, if it was one, likely came from the dark blue of the constructs Sorin was pretty sure Arii had seen kill his parents.)

Ludy meanwhile was staring right back at Preia, both eyebrows up.

"Those had better not also be apprentices! I only brought something for Pietro. Aren't they awfully small?"

"--For me?" Pietro stammered.

"Yeah, sure! Sorin's been writing me about you and--"

"Pietro," Sorin interrupted her, rolling his eyes and still trying to get Arii to unroll a little so he could carry him properly. "This is my sister Ludmilla, she's kind of weird, but she's nice, don't worry. I don't know the young man--"

"I'm not weird, and also he's Kwasi, he joined my group of adventurers three months back -- hey, come say hello! Kwasi, this is my brother Sorin, he's kind of annoying, but he's not horrible, I suppose."

Kwasi politely repressed a laugh as he came up, though his eyes danced with amusement. Sorin waved -- briefly, seeing as both his hands were kind of needed to keep the toddler from slipping and dropping to the ground.

"Sorry -- he hasn't had a good time of it recently. It's nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you," Kwasi replied mock-solemnly. Sorin had a hard time figuring out his age -- twenty, twenty-five? -- or why he was hanging out with his sister for a family visit instead of staying with the rest of the group, though Sorin was starting to get an idea.

"Where's your other... adventurers?"

Ludy waved a hand carelessly. "Oh, they're off getting rooms at the inn, aren't you glad. And who are the kids, come on already!"

She was already going down on one knee to shoulder off her backpack, rummaging through it. Sorin shook his head, vaguely despairing. Almost thirty years old and she was still a _brat_.

"This is Arii, and this is Preia. They're Veli's relatives, you remember him, the jaeger? I'm kind of..."

"Babysitting them?" Ludy said, and pulled a clockwork frog from her bag and handed it to Pietro. "Here, that's for you. "

Pietro stood there staring at the frog and being completely baffled. Ludy laughed.

"Let's... go with that," Sorin allowed. "Though it's probably going to be pretty long-term and -- Pietro, I told you, she's just weird, just go with it."

"Hey! He's your first apprentice, that's important, okay? See, if you press this button then it croaks out a little song. So you _still_ hang out with Veli?" She grinned up at him from her crouch, the tip of the ridiculously long scabbard dragging on the ground. How did she even use the thing, were normal bastard swords not good enough anymore or something -- "How many years 's it been?"

"--Uh. Yeah. I do."

"That's a surprise, when do you even hang out? You don't even leave your village anymore, you _homeboy_."

"Yeah, well, I guess we're pretty good friends," Sorin said drolly.

She was trying to lure Preia closer by telling her to come and see if there was anything in her hoard the girl wanted. Against all odds the little ball of suspicion and rage was slowly being charmed. Maybe it was the potential for knives and ancient Spark traps in that mess...

Meanwhile Kwasi was looking at Sorin and the child in his arms with a ' _...Oh. **Oh!** '_ face if Sorin had ever seen one.

Their eyes met and the young man ducked his head, looking awkward and probably blushing. Well, crap.

"Yeah," Sorin forced out, "Veli still visits. Pretty often, actually, we're not that far from Mechanicsburg and it turns out I might be keeping his grandchildren. To raise, I mean." Probably for good. But he hadn't talked to Preia about it yet -- one week in, it was still much too early.

Ludmilla and Preia both blinked up at him from where they'd been admiring an ornate, all-over-rust spring-loaded dagger.

"We're not his grandchildren," Preia said, grouchy.

"Yeah, okay, great-grand-niece and nephew, I was trying to keep it short but--"

"Does Mother know?" Ludy asked, getting back up. Preia stayed crouched by her bag, though she stole frequent glances at the lot of them. Sorin thought about warning Ludy about the girl's sticky fingers, then figured he'd bring it up later, if anything disappeared. Ludy might not care, and better to handle it in private anyway.

"Not yet. I was planning to wait a bit before writing. See how we got along."

Arii was still curled up, though at least he wasn't trembling anymore. Sorin shuffled the boy's weight; his arms were getting sore. He briefly considered handing him off to Pietro, but Pietro was still fiddling with the clockwork frog looking quietly baffled.

"Well, now that you've got a house it's probably doable, too; if you were still on the road..." Ludmilla blinked. "I guess you did always kind of like children."

Sorin looked at his sister, who still wasn't getting it, and at the young man beside her who did.

It shamed him a little that of all the reasons -- that he was now a respectable, respected adult, that he was quite secure about himself and his way of life, that he didn't want to pretend all his life even in private, that Pietro already knew and hadn't taken it badly -- what tipped the balance was that Ludy was not a gossip, and that she would be leaving soon.

"Yeah," he said, and almost managed lightly, "I do, it's too bad I'm not the marrying type."

Ludmilla laughed, easy and clear. "Yeah, me neither."

Kwasi slapped a hand across his face.

"Ludy," Sorin said, and then came short. "Ludy."

He allowed Arii who had unfolded to slip to the ground, though he kept holding him against his leg until he was sure the kid only wanted to go where his sister was.

"Hmm?" Ludy said, head turned away to keep an eye on the two of them.

"Ludy, _I'm an invert_."

She whipped her head up, stared at him. Kwasi was coughing into his fist.

Pietro ducked his head, crouched beside Arii and pretended to peer into the bag. Preia looked up, frowning quizzically. Sorin couldn't afford to look down at her, to let her ask. (Later, if she asked then. Not now.)

Ludmilla stared for another three centuries, or at least three seconds, and then went " _Oh._ Oh wow. Seriously? Wow." Her mouth stayed open for another second, and then she blurted out, "Wait, is _Veli your boyfriend?!_ "

It was a very serious moment, weighty and stressful to an uncomfortable point, and Sorin still started laughing.

She laughed too, a burst of uncontrollable mirth, and then she threw her arms around his shoulders and crumpled against him, and they laughed like hyenas for no reason at all.

"Do the parents know?!"

"I think they kind of guessed, oh, _twelve years back?_ " Sorin said, and snickered. Wasn't like he'd ever dared to ask, but in retrospect, the matchlock thing was starting to look kind of unsubtle.

"That is so not fair! Why didn't anyone tell me?!"

"I don't know, we thought you'd have figured it out by now? I mean, seriously, I'm thirty-five and I've never had a single girlfriend!"

"I just thought you never had one you wanted to introduce your family to!" she shouted back with an incredulous laugh -- and then abruptly went back to a conversational tone. "By the way, this is Kwasi."

... Yeah, so, Sorin was laughing again. So was Kwasi, actually, shoulders shaking as he tried to keep his mirth quiet.

"Yeeeah, I figured it out the first time."

" _Hey_."

"Because I'm not _totally oblivious_. Hi, Kwasi."

"Hey!"

"Hi," Kwasi returned with a wide grin. "It _is_ nice to meet you. So many things about Ludmilla become clearer now, I can't wait to meet your parents."

"What's that _mean_?" she spluttered.

"Our parents are actually pretty normal," Sorin said, thoughtful moue and all. "Well, Father is. I guess Mother could be pretty dangerous."

Ludy made a face. "She has like zero sense of humor."

"Yeah, that's Father. Also I'll tell her you said that." He eyed Kwasi up and down, lips pursed, still oddly bubbly inside from his sister's laughter, her lack of care. "Okay, now to find something to criticize you about... I'd say something about how much younger you are, but--"

"Oh, I'd like to see that! It's only six years; how old is Veli again? Three hundred? _Five_ hundred?"

"One hundred and eighty-something," Sorin corrected primly. "Which is clearly much better, and yeah, that was my point, I'm going to have to find something else to dislike you over, it's my job as a big brother, I'm really sorry."

Half the contents of Ludy's bag were now strewn on the ground for Preia and Arii to paw and admire at leisure. Sorin didn't miss Pietro's sigh, the way all tension flowed out of his gangly frame, the still-shaky side-hug he gave the little boy beside him. Preia meanwhile seemed to have put the adults' discussion out of her mind entirely in order to admire a bejeweled mouse trap. He had a feeling the topic would resurface later with her. Oh well.

"Uh, so who else knows?" Ludy asked, throwing the kids a sudden wary, wincing glance. Pietro ducked his head.

"Apart from Veli and every single one of his brothers, you mean? Pietro. Also the Lady Heterodyne," he added drolly. "Long story. Otherwise I haven't really been spreading it around."

"--The Lady -- Pietro? Like, _this_ Pietro?"

"Master Petrescu told me because Arii and Preia were staying." Pietro gave a little awkward shrug, head still bowed to watch said kids. "That if, if men could get married, they'd be married, but they can't. So."

So. Yeah.

Even discounting the fact that Sorin and Veli were as used to acting discreet as birds were to walking everywhere, Pietro boarded in his house; there was no way he wouldn't wake up one time Veli was staying the night and come out to pee and hear _things_. Not telling him -- making it this huge shameful secret he had to keep -- making him wonder if this was as sordid as tavern jokes and rumors said, if Sorin might ever be interested in teenage boys...

Sorin was pretty much married. End of discussion. He'd taken it pretty well, all things considered.

"So when do the parents get to meet Kwasi? And do you have a caravan to travel with, the woods are infested with wild beasts at this time of the year."

"Yes, see, the reason I came to Europe was I've always wanted to see a polar bear," Kwasi said, vaguely apologetic. "I've been told since then that I'm _many_ miles too far south yet, but a brown one would still be pretty nice."

Good Lord, but they were well-suited. "I hope you don't mind that they all have robot limbs," Sorin said, chuckling, and shook his head.

They spent another ten minutes chattering -- mostly Ludy showing off things she'd found and telling stories of where she'd found them, and Sorin reining her in because as fascinated as Preia was getting, she'd give Arii nightmares with some of the more hair-raising ones -- and then Sorin regretfully mentioned that he and Pietro should get back to work already.

"Aww. Will you at least drop by the inn later, to meet everyone?"

Sorin hesitated. An evening out sounded nice, but the children weren't used to being in his house yet, and he wasn't too sure how Pietro could babysit Arii if he didn't dare pick him up.

"... Maybe -- and a half-hour, but no longer," he said, and threw his brood a dark look. "It'll depend on how easily I get them into bed."

"It would be very nice," Kwasi assured him. "I'm told one of our companions is also one of your old friends and she would be very--"

Sorin groaned. "Oh red _fire_. Tell me you're not traveling with Rozalia."

"We're not traveling with Rozalia," Ludy lied blandly. "And if you don't show up I _won't_ tell her that you chickened out."

"I'll be there," Sorin growled. "I will be there if I have to take the kids along, and let me tell you, if I do, you're the one who'll get to babysit."

"Pfff! That's fine."

"Babysitters _don't get to drink_."

He caught her by the shoulders, turned her around, and frog-marched her out of his courtyard as she spluttered. Kwasi followed, chuckling, spear on his shoulder and her backpack in hand.

"Now get off my property, you jerk. I'll see you tonight."

"You had _better_. I'll come to drag you out if you don't!"

But before she left she flipped around and out of his grip, and then she hugged him around the neck fit to pop his head off. Sighing, he hugged back, smiling despite himself.

"And you're the jerk, jerk."

"No, you."

"You more."

Sorin didn't even bother with another comeback; Preia was looking at the two of them from all her eight years of life, supremely unimpressed. "You fight like little kids."

Sorin looked down at her, pursed his lips sternly, and said, "No, you."

He gave his sister a last shove, and off she went, laughing down the street and not caring one whit about all the neighbors pausing to watch her go through. Kwasi turned to wave at them, and then they turned the corner and were gone.

"Okay, everyone, back to... whatever you were doing."

"She didn't give Arii anything," Preia observed, holding tight onto her little treasure box with the big bronze lock and key.

"He didn't seem to want anything," Sorin replied. "He can look again later if he wants. We're meeting them at the inn after dinner."

He had a very clear image of how well it would go (read: not at all; Arii was bound to start crying at the first loud noise -- so, before they even fully stepped in, probably -- and if he didn't lose Preia under a table and find her in possession of several new table knives and Pietro didn't sink into a self-recriminating cloud of misery for not having stopped her he would be very surprised.)

But hey, maybe he'd get to drink half a beer first, before they had to go.

And if Arii toppled the other half over Rozalia's lap, he would consider it time and money well spent, so hey.


	10. treehouse silliness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happens between chapters three and four of pyroclastic, when Veli is still hanging out in Sorin's town.
> 
> is also completel pointless.
> 
> ONE DAY I WILL WRITE YOU, BOTTOMING SORIN. ONE DAY. >:(

"I don't remember why I wanted to be buggered so badly," Sorin says as he hauls himself up the trunk. The tree sways under his not-exactly-gentle attempts.

Veli, sprawled on a platform that seems to have started life as someone's barn door, watches his attempts and laughs a lot. He's propped up on an elbow and cheering every time Sorin manages to reach the next branch -- or slips and drops to the one underneath, depending.

"Hyu don't?" he calls out, chin cradled in his hand, eyes dreamy, the picture of contentment. Sorin spits a leaf out of his mouth and glares.

"One, you're a jerk."

"Hy vos one from de start, darlink. Iz not false advertising here."

"Two -- hff -- two, what's good about a butt anyway. Shut up. I mean. _Inside_." Veli waggles his eyebrows. Sorin glares some more, and swings to the other side of the trunk in a risky but ultimately successful maneuver. "I mean what's in it for me--"

Veli cracks up. "'It' _iz_ de ting vhat's in hyu, Hy tink."

"Also washing myself _there_ was a pain and I don't know if I should have bothered," Sorin growls, face scarlet, as he attacks the trunk with renewed determination. "Only it was too gross not to! And now this is kind of ruining our first time, thinking back about--"

"Honey," the jerk says in a soft, gentle, _laughing breathless underneath_ voice, "Hy had not eaten my fill in a while, dere vas nothing up dere."

A pause.

"No don't say it--"

"Apart from hyu pri--"

" _I get it!_ " Sorin howls, out of breath more from a terminal case of embarrassment than from the exertion.

"Bwahaha."

Sorin's hand slaps the platform. Veli generously closes his fingers around Sorin's wrist and pulls him right up. Sorin scrambles on, slumps on hands and knees -- oh, hey, cushions.

He gives Veli a suspicious glare, his hands burrowing in blankets. "Do I even want to know why this looks like a two-penny novel's idea of a pirate's love nest? I mean, there's a silk shirt in here, who does it even belong to, did you steal it--"

"Hy give it back," Veli promises solemnly, eyes dancing with green lights. "Afterwards."

"After we've done the beast with two backs on top of it?"

Veli grins, all teeth out -- and then Sorin is tumbling around. He ends up on his back, staring up at the sky and the leaves, and then at his lover's face when the jerk leans over him.

"Iz mine shirt," he reassures Sorin, shoulders shaking, the complete pest.

"I should get out of the tree and go back home," Sorin grumbles, already wriggling into the blankets to make a comfortable nest. One of them is folded wrong under his shoulder blade. "Why do you have a silk shirt anyway?"

"Looks nice!"

"But why aren't you _wearing it_ then."

"Feels nice too." He leans in, kisses the tip of Sorin's nose. "Also Hy tore de hell out of it de one time ten years back, but it schtill feels _very_ nice."

Yeah, Sorin is blushing again. The way Veli is smiling, he has _plans_ for that shirt, and not a one of them is non-nefarious.

"You're a deviant with bizarre fetishes."

"One of vhich is vanting to bugger hyu."

He makes himself comfortable on top of Sorin, kisses his neck, but even as Sorin's hands come up to hug him between the shoulder blades, he gentles.

"Still interested?"

Sorin hesitates. Not because he's not interested anymore, but because damn, it's embarrassing to admit exactly how mad with curiosity he is about it, and how difficult climbing the tree was with his dick hard enough to joust with the branches and come up the winner probably.

"... Well, I guess I'm still in the tree."

He pulls Veli down on to of him so he can kiss the laugh right off his lips.

(Veli just laughs into his mouth instead. Asshole.)

\--

"No but seriously, why do you even have that shirt."

"Vos mine first experience vith de, hyu know, sensual stuff. Feathers are also goot for it..."

"You put a feather on me -- ngh -- I'll bite, I'm serious--"

"Ticklish?"

" _No_ , and also why are you keeping a shirt you can't even wear when you've got to travel so light -- hhf, okay, that's a _little_ nice. Um. Maybe too light for me though. Like, trailing it is too--"

"Und dis way?"

"... Yeah, good. But damn does it look silly. I mean, if it's torn then you might as well make a glove out of -- Veli? Is that tear what I think it is?"

"If hyu tink iz arrow hole, hyu iz right!"

"Oh my god."

"Eh. Hy figure mebbe it can catch another arrow vith de parts dat are not torn some day. Silk is pretty goot for arrows, really."

"Wow, a reason that makes vague logical sense! That almost explains why it has _frills_ \-- ngh!"

"Und in de meantime, iz verra nice to tease boyfriends with."


End file.
